Honorable mentions: I saw Lady Lamb the Beekeeper (real name Aly Spaltro) at the Brighton Music Hall in the spring, having never heard her music before in my life. And it was probably one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. She kicked off the small show (capacity is 476, and it wasn’t full) with an a cappella performance of “Up in the Rafters,” leaving the lights off so the crowd was forced to focus on her layered, ridiculously powerful voice. Once the rest of her band came in, it was clear she could rock with the best of them, as she played through basically all of her 2013 album Ripely Pine. The Beekeeper’s songs — most notably the hard-charging “Bird Balloons” and “You Are the Apple” — are great because they surprise you in their construction; you never know quite where each song is going to go, and they manage to be intense, personal, and gratifying (she mentions a lot of body parts).

It was a good year for musical newcomers. Chance the Rapper has one of the weirdest (and sometimes most aggravating) voices in rap, but his mixtape Acid Rap stood out for its introspective originality and smooth soul-influenced beats in the sometimes-monotone age of popular rap. Hopefully Lorde continues to make hypnotic jams like “Royals” and HAIM continues to not let their bass player’s funny faces bring them down.

Barkhad Abdi was born in Somalia, somehow making it out to Minneapolis when he was a teenager. He seems like a perfect choice to play Muse, the lead pirate taking over the Maersk Alabama in Captain Phillips, since he, well, looks like an impoverished Somali pirate. It was his first film role.

Part of the reason that Captain Phillips was so great was its treatment of Muse and the pirates as victims of their own horrendous circumstance. Muse hijacks the ship to prove himself to his criminal overlords, but it’s not out of love of his profession — he has no other choice. Abdi plays him as an outwardly assertive man who doesn’t have the agency to deal with a situation that’s no longer in his control. He’s not a villain — he’s just a human. And Abdi, whose authenticity in his role reminded me (unfairly or not) of the similarly green actor Leandro Firmino in City of God) brings that out of him.

Edward Snowden, in his interview with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras

News Story of the Year

Honorable mentions: It was a year of instability, both abroad and domestically. The Syrian Civil War was a topic of conversation for months, with talk of “red lines” and “chemical weapons stockpiles” and “missile gaps” — wait, which conflict is this again?

A bunch of big-name trials took place this year, starting with the George Zimmerman case and continuing with the trials of Jodi Arias and Whitey Bulger. We also learned of Aaron Hernandez’s (allegedly…) murderous tendencies (and his — also alleged — infatuation with angel dust) and we suffered through the horrifying events of Marathon Monday at the hands of the Tsarnaev brothers.

There’s nothing like a good whistleblower to shake things up around here. Edward Snowden’s exposure of the NSA’s data collection tactics meant something, as people finally had to stop and think about what they were putting out there on the internet. Except this time, this wasn’t self-provided information users implicitly agreed to share on a site like Facebook — this was “metadata,” the foggy term that seems to mean everything from time stamps to location data.

His reveal, facilitated by columnist Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian, opened up an intense debate on the reach the government should have on keeping tabs on their own citizens. This wasn’t a brand-new discussion by any means — I’d heard Dan Carlin talk about government surveillance a lot on his Common Sense podcast before the leaks, and Ryan Lizza’s recent New Yorker story about the surveillance programs shows how people like Senator Ron Wyden have been speaking out against them for years. But Snowden’s revelations made the reach of these programs clear, and the alleged benefits of these programs have been murky at best. The first 2 Amendments to the Bill of Rights (and maybe the 5th, at least on law television shows) are the ones most prevalent in modern American culture, but don’t be fooled: the 4th Amendment is coming back with a vengeance.

Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Wolf of Wall Street”

Performance of the Year

Honorable mentions: For performances, we probably have to divide the year into the Real Person division and the Fictional Character division. Emma Thompson leads the way in the non-fiction division with her portrayal of author P.L. Travers in Saving Mr. Banks. She manages to humanize someone who can be so aggravating sometimes, letting the vulnerability of the Mary Poppins scribe slip through her prim and proper demeanor. Judi Dench‘s character Philomena Lee could also be annoying sometimes, but her fun portrayal of a once-shamed unmarried mother trying to find her long-lost son made Philomena one of my favorites of the year. Michael Fassbender and Lupita Nyong’o disappeared into their roles as an evil slave driver and the chief receiver of his torment in 12 Years A Slave.Matthew McConnaughey shed his toned physique for the wasted-away appearance of AIDS sufferer Ron Woodroof in Dallas Buyers Club, though his good-old-boy charm remained in his likable performance. Daniel Bruhl and Chris Hemsworth played polar opposites in Rush, though each gave you a reason to care about and respect Niki Lauda and James Hunt respectively. And Michael Douglas put on the performance of his career as Liberace in Behind the Candelabra — too bad you needed HBO to see it.

In terms of fictional characters, Oscar Isaac brought a whole new level (and a startlingly affecting singing voice) to the down-on-his-luck title jerk in Inside Llewyn Davis. I could go on and on about how much I loved and wanted to hang out with Sam Rockwell‘s water park mentor character in The Way Way Back, or how much I wanted to murder Steve Carell‘s icy boyfriend character in the same film. We’ll count Fat Christian Bale‘s Irving Rosenfeld as a fictional character, since American Hustle is probably more fiction than non-fiction; he almost topped Dicky Eklund in this one. Sandra Bullock kept us grounded in Gravity, while Ryan Gosling made the most of his surprisingly short time playing the modern-day rebel without a cause Luke Glanton in The Place Beyond the Pines. I’ve decided James Franco was stupidly great (as opposed to greatly stupid) in Spring Breakers and that Mark Wahlberg made Pain and Gain worth watching. And for TV, hollaback to Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Veep), Keri Russell (The Americans), Taryn Manning (Orange is the New Black), James Wolk (Mad Men), Nikolaj Coster-Waldeau (Game of Thrones), and, obviously, Dean Norris and Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad).

So yeah, really narrowed it down.

Winner: Leonardo DiCaprio, The Wolf of Wall Street

Leo just does his own thing, quietly putting together an all-time great career without ever winning an Oscar. This time — despite it being an amazing year for Best Actor performances — he deserves it with his ego-less portrayal of the disgusting corporate monster Jordan Belfort. Jordan has all of the typical DiCaprio qualities: good looks, suaveness, the ability to command a room with just a few words. He’s also a vulgar drug addict who specializes in womanizing and grifting money off of dumb investors.

Jordan’s cool, but not as cool as he thinks. One of the best scenes in the movie is one between him and an FBI agent played by Kyle Chandler (who always deserves acting accolades). He thinks he’s playing him, when really the FBI agent is one step ahead of his cocky butt the entire time. But usually Jordan thinks he’s cooler than he’s coming off because he’s too messed up on coke and quaaludes to notice. His scene where he’s crawling to and from his car while incapable of human speech is certainly showy, but only a select few Hollywood actors would dare pull it off (i.e., would/could Will Smith do this? Don’t think so).

Check out my full review of the movie on Christmas Day when it comes out. But trust me — you won’t see a better performance this year than Leo as that mess of a human.

Will Ferrell and Christina Applegate in “Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues”

Anchorman 2 feels like it disappoints at the box office, though it still made a buttload of money: The most ubiquitous movie of the year, Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, came in 2nd at this weekend’s box office, with its $26.8 million take eclipsed by The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug‘s $31.4 million, according to Box Office Mojo. At first glance, it appears that audiences weren’t as hyped up for the return of Ron Burgundy as Will Ferrell was — or maybe they just resented the fact that they had seen him on television every freaking day for the last month.

But when you take into account the ticket sales from Tuesday night/Wednesday/Thursday, a $40 million opening for Anchorman 2 ain’t too bad. Still, a “B” CinemaScore gives you pause — CinemaScore is like the “Intro to Anthropology” or “Rocks for Jocks” of movie grades.

Fast and Furious 7 pushed back to April 2015, will still feature Paul Walker: Deadline reported this morning (at 4:46 PST — God, L.A. is the worst) that Universal will release the next Fast and Furious film about 10 months after it was originally scheduled, in order to allow for grieving for late star Paul Walker and to find a way to redo a screenplay that was already 50% shot. Apparently, Walker’s character Brian O’Connor will be in the film somehow. Feel like it will be bad publicity to kill him (or a very Paul Walker-ish stunt double) off in a car crash, so we’ll see what happens to him. Maybe they’ll go the Plan 9 From Outer Space route and recast him with a taller actor who holds his cloak over his face the rest of the movie.

Amazon and Target refuse to sell Beyonce’s new album; Bey likely couldn’t care less: Amazon.com has decided not to sell Beyoncé’s self-titled album that she released exclusively last week on iTunes. Target is doing the same thing. Apparently they don’t like being behind the curve, though it feels more like cutting off your nose to spite your face: why drive more people away from your distribution method, towards the one that’s already more convenient in the first place? Beyoncé doesn’t need them — her album’s sold a million copies in a week as it is.

Duck Dynasty‘s Phil Robertson speaks at prayer group; continues to say awful things in the name of religion: The Daily Mail has quite an account of Phil Robertson’s … um …. homily(?) at his church group on Sunday.

The best part of his rambling manifesto is where he says “I am just reading what was written 2000 years ago” — you know, that highly intellectual time of slavery, male dominance, sacrificial lambs, and a flat Earth?

It’s how Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale), a pudgy con-man with a bad toupee and diarrhea of the mouth, fidgets his way into untold wealth through phony loans and fake art. It’s how a hot-head (borderline unstable) FBI agent named Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper) can come to run a major federal investigation into political corruption. It’s how Irving’s girlfriend and scheme partner Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams) can convince their marks (and, later, Richie) that she is a British heiress named Edith Greensly.

But more importantly, it’s how a powerhouse Hollywood cast can make such a noisy, messy film worth watching.

The ad campaign for American Hustle doesn’t do a great job of explaining the movie’s plot, though it’s not exactly crystal clear once you start watching.

Loosely based (and I mean loosely — the title card brazenly says, “Some of this actually happened”) on the ABSCAM investigation of the 70s, American Hustle follows the uneasy team-up of the FBI with the con team of Irving and Sydney.

The FBI wants to expose corruption in the upper levels of politics, so it cooks up a scheme involving potential New Jersey development and a Middle-Eastern Sheik to entrap politicians. The success of this scheme becomes a foregone conclusion almost as soon as Irving and Sydney are compelled into cooperating, leading the film to meander to the end with low stakes.

But the meandering is part of the fun. Anyone who enjoyed Bale’s performance as Dicky Eklund in The Fighter (also directed by David O. Russell) will appreciate his rambling portrayal of Irving, a con artist with a heart of gold.

No director generates more naturalistic performances than Russell. He only cuts when he has to and he lets the conversations sprawl to the brink, whether they be arguments between Irving and his wily, immature wife played by the magnetic Jennifer Lawrence or shouting matches between Richie and his boss (Louis C.K., whose character is the only “rational” one in the film).

The period details are great, especially the opulent 70s costumes (Adams’ character is the least interesting of the stars’, so Russell seems to have compensated by letting all her shirts be low-cut to her belly button). The soundtrack is solid, but sometimes it gets a little loud and obvious — love “Dirty Work” by Steely Dan in the opening credits, but do we really need “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” to tell us the characters are done having fun?

The movie’s most sympathetic character is Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner), the mayor of Camden, New Jersey whom the FBI targets as the linchpin between them and the politicians. He’s not above taking the bribe, but he also does it in earnest, as he genuinely cares about the well-being of his constituents and thinks the potential development will help them.

Who’s worse: him, or the guys setting him up?

Whatever the movie’s saying about him is the closest thing American Hustle has to a point. Grade: B+

The protagonist of the latest Coen Brothers tale Inside Llewyn Davis is a struggling folk musician, whose prime takes place about a week before folk music becomes cool again. He has a sharp tongue and probably a drinking problem, and pretty much everyone who knows him either hates him or will hate him soon enough.

Llewyn (played with dirty realness by relative unknown Oscar Isaac) is one of those hard-headed musicians who would call themselves principled but whom mostly everyone else thinks is stubborn. He refuses to compromise his art to sell records and advance his career, even though he can’t afford his own place or even a winter coat.

The thing is, Llewyn is a good musician.

But is he great?

Or, at the very least, as great as he thinks he is?

He might not be in the world of the movie, where the sound of the times is dominated by chipper vocal groups like the one featuring Llewyn’s friends Jim and Jean Berkey (played by Justin Timberlake and Carey Mulligan). Llewyn scoffs at the song he’s invited to play at Jim’s recording session called “Please Mr. Kennedy,” a rollicking acoustic number about the space race that features hilarious sound effects by Adam Driver’s up-and-comer character Al Cody.

“Look, I’m happy for the gig, but who wrote this?” asks Llewyn with a condescending smirk.

” … I did,” says the more-successful Jim.

The soundtrack of traditional folk covers and some originals (produced by T-Bone Burnett, who should produce all things) is consistently great all the way through (the actors all perform the songs live in their entirety), but it’s Llewyn’s solo songs that are most fascinating. Isaac has the voice and look of a man who’s most at home while singing folk songs but who can’t stand the lack of success folk has provided to him. The last scene offers an interesting take on Llewyn’s circular life and on whether he can get out of his own way so he can be better than he is.

Though Inside Llewyn Davis doesn’t have the crime aspect that many Coen Brothers films include, the slightly-off characters and strange situations (like Llewyn’s road trip with John Goodman and a still-thinks-he’s-playing-Neal-Cassady Garrett Hedlund) will be a familiar sight to fans.

Honorable Mentions: The year started with a bang — or, really, a whimper, when the lights went out for some mysterious reason right after half time at Super Bowl XLVII, which eventually saw the Baltimore Ravens best the San Francisco 49ers in a thrilling contest. The 34-minute delay was so much more entertaining after the game, when the Ravens — with whom the world is perennially at war, according to them — started saying really stupid things about how the blackout was a scheme to disrupt their momentum (of course, that didn’t actually happen).

Speaking of the concept of momentum, one night in the believers’ favor was definitely the ridiculous Bruins comeback in Game 7 of the first round of the playoffs against the Toronto Maple Leafs, when the Bs scored 3 goals in the last 9 minutes (2 of them in the last 1:30 of regulation) to set up an eventual overtime win and avoid an embarrassing elimination. Who lost momentum this year? How about Tim Tebow, 2 seasons removed from the most improbable playoff victory ever, not even playing good enough to make a practice squad team? Tebowmania is dead, and honestly? I miss it.

In terms of big picture stories, the Biogenesis scandal gave us more fun reasons to hate Ryan Braun and Alex Rodriguez, mostly for being lying cheats instead of plain-old truthful cheats. The Jonathan Martin-Richie Incognito incident has still yet to be resolved, yet it started a long-lasting conversation about the role of hazing and bullying in sports. And we finally have our first gay athlete: Jason Collins, who nonetheless has still yet to play in a game as an out homosexual. For that matter, Kerry Rhodes still hasn’t been signed either.

The winner: the 2013 Boston Red Sox

September 2011 — March 2013 was not a good time for the Olde Towne Team. First was the September collapse, then the explanation of the September collapse, which boiled down to “chicken and beer” and not the fact that, oh, I don’t know, you had freaking Kyle Weiland starting games for your team down the stretch. Theo Epstein jumped ship to the Chicago Cubs, Terry Francona got scapegoated and fired, and in came Epstein’s clone Ben Cherington and everybody’s nightmare Bobby Valentine.

Sure, it was fun to joke about Valentine’s insistence on hitting the cutoff man and his ability to invent the wrap, but the fact is that he presided over a horrendous year, in which his best players got hurt (Jacoby Ellsbury, David Ortiz), underperformed (Jon Lester, Clay Buchholz) or both (The Demon Left-Fielder of Landsdowne Street, Carl Crawford).

They were bums, plain and simple. They seemed at best entitled and at worst apathetic. So after pulling off the greatest salary dump of all time by shipping Josh Beckett, the Demon, and Nick Punto to Magic Johnson for some decent prospects, Ben Cherington worked on building a new team — a different team.

But it wasn’t about bringing in “nice guys” so they would have “good chemistry,” a cliché that doesn’t mean anything until you want it to. He targeted free agents coming off of disappointing walk years on short-term, slightly overpaid deals, and for the most part, they panned out.

The Shane Victorino signing got the most flack out of any of them ($13 million for .255 hitter who runs into walls?!?), but he ended up being a bargain, putting up a .294/.351.451 line, 15 dingers, otherworldly RF defense, and 5.6 fWAR as arguably the team’s best all-around player. Stephen Drew made (some) people forget about comparisons to his brother after a solid offensive campaign (AL shortstops don’t hit as well as you think) and some absurdly nasty post-season defense. Mike Napoli was a solid middle-of-the-order bat (even with all the strikeouts), and though Jonny Gomes quickly joined the Kendrick Perkins/Logan Mankins pantheon of overrated Boston post-season heroes, even he chipped in 13 regular-season homers (and 1 BIG post-season one).

No new player had more of an impact though than Koji Uehara, the 89 MPH closer machine. I’m sorry — to anyone that claims that baseball is boring, I ask you: have you watched this guy pitch? His efficient innings, which seemed to end 30 seconds after they started, with Uehara mowing guys down with pinpoint precision, were the most exciting sporting moments I’ve seen in Boston since Pedro Martinez pitched. And his Twitter is awesome.

More importantly though, it was a season of redemption for the holdovers. Dustin Pedroia continued his steady, heady play at 2B. Lester regained his dominating form. Jacoby Ellsbury had a sneaky-great season (led the team in fWAR) before his inevitably expensive defection to the Yankees.

But the one guy it was great to see it from: John Lackey. The big lug had a tumultuous first three years as a Red Sox, underperforming his first year before pitching through an elbow problem and divorce in his second year (which was, um … pretty bad). After Tommy John surgery and probably some weight loss, he came back this year and put up his lowest ERA since 2007, outdueled Justin Verlander in Game 3 of the ALCS, and won the clinching game of the World Series. He was representative of a team that not only overcame adversity, but also regained the trust of the public that grew to hate their guts.

Honorable Mentions: Likely no pop culture event galvanized the public like Miley Cyrus’ … interesting performance at the MTV Video Music Awards. She angered mothers for gyrating and twerking while wearing baby pajamas. She drew the ire of manyculturalcritics for the racial implications of her performance, which featured Miley appropriating ratchet culture and shoving her face into her black backup dancer’s booty. Even the creator of the foam finger criticized her for “degrading an honorable icon,” which was a hilarious case of someone taking himself way too seriously.

Perhaps the most iconic “had to be there” event was Sharknado, the hilariously stupid TV b-movie that trended on Twitter despite (or, probably, because of) the fact that it was a movie about a killer-shark-infused tornado. The announcement that Ben Affleck would play the Caped Crusader in the forthcoming Man of Steel sequel took over Twitter as well, but that was more for nerds that needed a place to vent about anything related to Batman (don’t people remember this?). The hype for the return of Arrested Development was sky-high until people actually started to watch it, soon finding out that it wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be (though it wasn’t nearly as bad as they made it out to be, either).

I don’t know if we’ll ever experience anything on TV again like the rush of energy that exuded from the last 8 episodes of Breaking Bad. The anticipation for every last episode was palpable from the first episode back from the annoying AMC hiatus, where Vince Gilligan didn’t have his newfound hero Hank Schrader lay off Walt but instead had him go for the jugular early. Conspiracy theories about ricin and Nazis and machine guns flew every which way, owing to the hyper-detailed sensibilities of the show’s creator. Pretty soon, the season cemented itself as the best final season of any show ever and the perfect intersection of high art and pulp fiction. Not bad for a sad-sack chemistry teacher and a meth junkie.

Richard Madden as Robb Stark in “Game of Thrones”

The winner: The Red Wedding (Game of Thrones)

I really don’t care for the people that have read the Song of Ice and Fire series and feel the need to gloat about it. They complain about the most minute details, preferring the book version to the undoubtedly superior television product. But the worst thing is how they spoil things for those of us who enjoy the show and haven’t read the books. I don’t even mean just outright spoilers; a simple “ohh, book 3 is so sad” is enough to put me over the edge. Because then I’m bracing myself for the sadness, which depresses the shock value that the series is so dependent on.

One of my roommates did this before this season’s penultimate episode of Game of Thrones titled “The Rains of Castamere” by telling us he wanted to watch the show live with us to see how we would react. I almost reacted right then by putting his head on a pike.

But for once, he didn’t spoil anything. Because the end of that episode was so shocking, so visceral, that nobody could have ever predicted it.

By now, even if you don’t watch the powerhouse HBO drama, you’ve probably at least heard the phrase “The Red Wedding,” an event which was supposed to be representative of a political alliance between the Starks and the Freys and instead ended up being a bloodbath of epically messy proportions. Robb Stark, who looked to be a hero on a noble quest to avenge his father’s death, fell to the ground riddled with arrows, with his wife, mother, and unborn child surrounding him in a lifeless heap.

Truthfully, as I said at the time, I didn’t expect that the King of the North was fit to survive much longer, as he had the same character flaws as his father, who met a similarly surprising end in season 1 — you know, honor and all that stuff.

But the Red Wedding was different. Maybe it was because we saw a mother (Talisa) stabbed in her pregnant belly like it was a watermelon. Maybe it’s because we saw Cat Stark beg for her son’s mercy with the threat of killing Walder Frey’s wife, only to have him say matter-of-factly “I’ll get another one” before sending Roose Bolton to give Robb the Brutus special. Maybe it’s because we saw Cat slice the woman’s throat with a cathartic cry, lamenting the violent demise of her failed family as the camera moved in on her before a henchman calmly walked behind her and slit her own throat.

Or maybe it’s just because we knew little Arya was right outside the doors.

Honorable mentions: Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball” blew me away when I first heard it, for its dipsy-do verse and punching pre-chorus that I for some reason always sing with a British accent. It didn’t depend on her name or whatever gimmick she had up her sleeve — it was just a really good song performed by a really good singer. OK, the video wasn’t bad either.

In fact, pop music in general had some solid songs, like Lorde’s “Royals” or Mariah Carey and Miguel’s “#Beautiful,” which was actually the second-best song this year with a hashtagged title (the best? Miley’s “#GETITRIGHT”). Drake’s “Hold On, We’re Going Home” has the smoothest hook he’s ever done, but no hook this year was more fun to scream out than A$AP Rocky’s “****in’ Problems.” And Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” was eminently catchy, even if it was a little repetitive (but I mean, it’s disco … ).

HAIM’s debut album Days Are Gone had so many jams, the most popular of which is probably the Eagles/Shania Twain/Fleetwood Mac hybrid “The Wire” but my favorite of which changes daily — right now it’s the grimy “My Song 5.” Janelle Monae and Justin Timberlake reached backwards in time on “Dance Apocalyptic” and “Pusher Love Girl,” while Lady Lamb the Beekeeper showed us a bright future on “You Are The Apple” and “Bird Balloons.”

Any other year, I might have to give this award to Kanye West’s insane “Blood on the Leaves” for its creativity (cross-sampling Nina Simone and TNGHT?), rapping (that verse!), and sheer ambition (lets take a song about lynching and turn it into a tale of baby mommas and abortions — fun!). Even today, I considered giving the award to Beyoncé for her D’Angelo-esque sex jam “Rocket,” which just came out last night.

So yeah, I’m pretty indecisive. But honestly, nothing can touch the winner.

Vampire Weekend

The winner:“Hannah Hunt” by Vampire Weekend

When I first listened to Vampire Weekend’s awesome third album Modern Vampires of the City, the first song that stuck out to me was “Diane Young.” It was catchy, it was upbeat, it sort of jolts you in there after the first three gentle acoustic songs. It felt like Elvis Presley coming to knock Simon and Garfunkel off the stage.

But “Hannah Hunt” sneaks up on you. Ezra Koenig coos the sparse lyrics over the gentlest of gentle piano chords, which grow slowly throughout the song. He sings about a flighty girl named Hannah, who convinces the narrator to move across the country, only to realize the grass isn’t actually greener on the other side. The narrator grows from someone that believes totally in he and Hannah’s love (“A man of faith said hidden eyes could see what I was thinking/I just smiled and told him that was only true of Hannah”) to someone that suddenly becomes wary of her discontentment (“If I can’t trust you then dammit, Hannah”).

It’s a song about growing up, which Koenig and the rest of Vampire Weekend did mightily in this album. They couldn’t just be the quirky guys talking about laughing on Cape Cod while drinking horchata and questioning the Oxford comma (I mean, Koenig is almost 30). Maybe disillusionment isn’t a theme that everyone wants to hear in a pop song. But you have to appreciate the breakdown in the last minute of the song, where the whole band comes in and plays in that full, Exile on Main Street pounding piano style and Koenig wails the final chorus as a plea to Hannah.

There shouldn’t be an award for this, because frankly, commercials are annoying. They disrupt our enjoyment of a given piece of entertainment (look at all these things on the sides! <———>), as we conveniently ignore the fact that an advertising presence pays for what we’re ingesting in the first place. Commercials pass in front of our faces constantly, yet 70 percent of them are unmemorable, 10 percent are memorable for how bad they are, and 19 percent are worth watching for the cheap sex appeal (yes, those numbers are estimates). Some are aggravating for their stupid slogans (if I hear another word about that Discount Double-Check … ), others for their unclear implications (why does a guy staying in the basement make the Broncos play well?) or probably just their shameless sexism (i.e., anything by GoDaddy.com).

But one commercial — or set of commercials, really — stuck out this year. It wasn’t just because these spots were played non-stop, since I was genuinely happy every single time one came on the television. I’m speaking of course of the children’s focus group ads for the AT&T “It’s Not Complicated” campaign.

Kids do say the darndest things. They’re capable of blending profound amounts of knowledge with pure, unfiltered gibberish to make something completely individual and unique. AT&T and their ad agency, frequent Don Draper foe BBDO, knew this, which is why they put their success in the hands of a few not-overly-precocious children and one able-bodied snarky-pants, YouTube comedian (and now SNL featured player) Beck Bennett. Bennett doesn’t do much aside from prompting the kids and keeping a straight face, as well as almost always coming up with a perfect kicker to end each segment. I’m not naive enough to ignore the likely dozens (hundreds?) of unusable hours left on the cutting room floor, but the 5 or so minutes that have been used for the spots have been absolute gold (this AdWeek profile is a great look at the process).

Some of my favorites? The “two things at once” one:

The very revealing “We want more” one:

This classic joke:

And … well, this one:

Why don’t companies make their ads like this more often? This idea must have cost almost nothing to execute, yet it was creative and memorable. I’m not sure it made me want to run out and buy AT&T service for my phone, but it at least made those 30-second ad slots not just tolerable, but enjoyable.

Come back in the next couple days to find out the SweetPete-ie for Best Song of the Year. I’ll give you a hint: it sounds nothing like “Got to Give It Up”

Each day ( … hopefully) for the rest of the year, Sweet Pete’s Culture Club will give out the 1st Annual SweetPete-ies, a collection of awards devoted to the best and worst of 2013 in pop culture. They’re entirely subjective and are only based on things I’ve seen, so feel free to weigh in and berate me about how wrong I am.

Today: the SweetPete-ie for Worst Movie of the Year

Honorable mentions: You really had to try hard to separate your own crappy movie from some of the fecal sewage that lingered at the bottom of the 2013 film landscape. In any other year, a colossal failure such as M. Night Shyamalan’s AfterEarthwould have topped the list with ease, since it made its “$250 million domestic gross, guaranteed” star Will Smith sit in the back of a crashed spaceship with a broken leg and essentially narrate (in the year’s worst accent) his quivering son’s journey through the hackest version of Pandora imaginable. Thank God he passed up Django to do that.

Phantom, the Cold War potboiler that barely simmered, probably isn’t well-known enough to get the top prize, though it scored the highest on the Boringness scale. The title of 21 and Over must have referred to the number of awful, racist, misogynistic, unfunny jokes that occurred in each minute of that movie. I would prefer to suffer a bullet to the head than watch Bullet to the Head one more time, and I feel pretty much the same way about the tepid teen fantasies The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones and Beautiful Creatures.

The winner: R.I.P.D.

In the summer of 2011, a friend and I decided to check out what all the fuss was about at Occupy Boston down by South Station. Having not been to a multi-day, large-scale protest before, I was expecting passionate speeches, uplifting unity, and hopefully one or two naked bodies. Needless to say, the dirty apathy of the site was disappointing, so we walked through the financial district and came upon a massive movie shoot. We saw a gigantic man in a motion-capture suit and Jeff Bridges in a dirty overcoat sitting on a street populated by trash and junked cars. We realized the crew was setting up for a shot where the car that Bridges (or really, his stunt double) was driving would speed off a jump. Obviously, we had to stay. How often do you see a car hit a jump like that? It will be awesome, right?

It wasn’t. Talk about a letdown. I’d call it “the power of movies,” but somehow R.I.P.D. managed to make this moment and every last one of its 96 minutes some of the most unpleasant times I’ve ever had in a movie theater.

R.I.P.D. was an unmitigated disaster, and I mean that in the most disrespectful way possible.

The plot (an undead, purgatorial police force hunts down “deados,” which are souls that remain on Earth as monsters after they die instead of just accepting the afterlife) was so dumb that it’s amazing any studio executive made it past the log line. But clearly whoever backed this movie had some sort of financial death wish, since he or she decided to bank on Hollywood’s least bankable star (Ryan Reynolds, the Green Lantern himself) to save this mess from whatever shortcomings had to have been apparent at the time.

Reynolds is one of the more blank, lifeless leading men around, but he was a welcome sight in comparison to his costars like the incomprehensible Jeff Bridges (as his 19th-century gunslinger partner) or the gravelly-voiced Kevin Bacon (as the gravelly-voiced bad guy). The whole movie’s a clear attempt to recreate Men in Black, yet the broad “humor” (Jeff Bridges looks like Marisa Miller on Earth! Ha-ha! Ryan Reynolds is an Asian guy whose gun looks like a banana! Ha-HA!) doesn’t work and the splotchy “special effects” (that looked even worse in 3D) could have been made in Microsoft Paint.

I guess that’s what $130 million buys you these days.

Check back tomorrow for the next SweetPete-ie: Best Ad Campaign of the Year

Each day ( … hopefully) for the rest of the year, Sweet Pete’s Culture Club will give out the 1st Annual SweetPete-ies, a collection of awards devoted to the best and worst of 2013 in pop culture. They’re entirely subjective and are only based on things I’ve seen, so feel free to weigh in and berate me about how wrong I am.

First up: Best Online Video of the Year.

Honorable mentions: It’s tough not to give this award to “The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?)”, the hysterically weird music video by the Norwegian comedy duo Ylvis. The genius of the song is how it can be so catchy while also being incredibly stupid, a statement which you could probably make about all the songs that Ylvis is parodying (doesn’t “The Fox” sound like a tune Enrique Iglesias could drop any second?). Also on my list would be a trio of news interviews: the animated, unlikely hero Charles Ramsey describing his McDonalds-powered rescue of Amanda Berry and her fellow captives; Uncle Ruslan delivering a frank, powerful condemnation of the actions of his nephews, the Tsarnaevs; and a strange surfer bro named Kai giving a stirring (and profane) account of how he “Smash, smash, sa-MASH(ed)” a batterer with a hatchet while he was hitchhiking in his car. That story would be a lot funnier if Kai didn’t get arrested for murder (a different one) two months later.

R. Kelly

The winner: R. Kelly’s interview with Rolling Stone has been viewed by a fraction of the people who have watched the previously mentioned videos (granted, it just came out a few weeks ago). No surprise — R. Kelly isn’t that popular anymore, his recent appearance on the Lady Gaga hit “Do What U Want” notwithstanding.

But the video is such a perfect microcosm of Kelly’s talents and personality, and it essentially confirms what we’ve all thought and hoped about him for years: that he can make anything sound sexy, as long as you’re not actually listening to the words he’s singing.

In the video, Rolling Stone asks Kelly to come up with songs based on a phrase that it would provide to him. It takes 15 seconds for him to start singing “Sex Dolphin.”

At first, it’s funny just for the lyrics he seemingly comes up with out of nowhere: the high-pitched dolphin squeals (“Sex Dolphin), the inclusion of his chain and his Dylan-esque line of “We can get in/To one of them fights/Like they do/Onhockeyeverynight” (“Ice Hockey”), “Bring me a paper/Ohhhh, oooo ohhhh” (“Sex Newspaper”), and literally every word he says in “Italian Hero Sandwich of Love.” It almost comes off as an SNL skit of what R. Kelly is actually like in studio, throwing out lyrics and sounds off-the-cuff like an absent-minded melody machine. No wonder the guy could make hours of Trapped in the Closet material — he can sing things beautifully that we would never consider even saying in normal conversation, let alone consider making a song around those words.

But that’s the thing about Kelly. Accessibility for him never meant broadening his music to appeal to the largest audience possible, since he’s always been pretty good at that anyway. He wanted to sing about things that we knew (see his new album, bluntly called Black Panties). He said, “I don’t see nothing wrong with a little bump n’ grind” because he didn’t feel like tiptoeing around the subject. His metaphors are about as tough to unpack as a candy bar (“Ignition” probably most obvious of them all), but that doesn’t mean they’re any less satisfying once you realize what they mean. In fact, that’s why Kelly is so clever in this video: those dolphin sounds mean something! “Yum yum yum/for your tum, tum, tum” means something!

R. Kelly is the poster child for the man whose mind constantly applies (or can apply) everything around him to sex. And I think — no, I am positive — he would take that as a compliment.

Check back tomorrow for the next SweetPete-ie: Worst Movie of the Year. It’s horrible.

Sirena Irwin and Bill Mendieta as Lucy and Ricky Ricardo (photo by JustinBarbin.com)

I Love Lucy, already famous for having a lot of famous television firsts (e.g., first interracial couple on a series, the first pregnant woman playing a pregnant woman), made its biggest technical influence on sitcom production with the decision to film in front of a live studio audience. The laughter felt more organic than the disparate laugh track that plagued sitcoms like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, and it allowed star Lucille Ball to feed off the audience’s energy.

I Love Lucy Live on Stage (playing at the Citi Emerson Colonial Theatre through December 22) attempts to recreate that live frenzy by transporting the audience back to the 1950s for the live taping of two episodes, complete with old-timey commercials and an applause sign.

The original I Love Lucy series still holds up as a near-perfect vision of smart, silly slapstick.

So why wasn’t anybody laughing at the stage show?

Sure, there were parts that elicited a few hearty chuckles, such as the screeching Pleasant Peasant Girls commercial or Lucy’s swaggering dance teacher King Katt Walsh (played by Jeffrey Christopher Todd on opening night). The four main cast members — Sirena Irwin and Bill Mendieta as Lucy and Ricky Ricardo and Kevin Remington and Carolynne Warren as Fred and Ethel Mertz — all play their classic counterparts well, with Irwin deserving special praise for her ability to perfect Ball’s vocal and physical mannerisms.

But the audience never sounded completely into it. There was none of that raucous laughter that overtook the show’s dialogue like screaming girls at a Beatles concert — these were polite smirks, if anything. I Love Lucy was a show that swung for the fences with its loud humor. But why bother trying to hit home runs when the fans react like you’ve just hit a bunt single?

Maybe it was the show’s choice of episodes. The full episodes you watch being “filmed” (complete with interesting little wrinkles, such as costume changes and bloopers) are “The Benefit” — in which Lucy schemes to do a stage act with Ricky — and “Lucy Has Her Eyes Examined” — in which Lucy learns the jitterbug to impress a movie producer. Neither are particularly iconic episodes, or even popular ones; in IMDB’s list of episodes, both are in the bottom half of the I Love Lucy canon as voted by users (“The Benefit” is actually the 4th worst of the show’s 180 episodes). One wonders how much more fun the show could have been with episodes that were more well-known — or really, just funnier. Lucy trudging around in a vat of grapes or slurring through the Vitameatavegamin commercial would no doubt have been received more warmly.

Maybe it was the TV studio format. Mark Christopher Tracy provided an amiable presence as Maury Jasper, the Desilu Playhouse Host, especially in his interactions with audience members (like in the cute mid-show trivia challenge between an audience member and a planted cast member). But his character’s constant anachronistic jokes grew tiring. How many times can you wink at the audience with exultations of new-fangled inventions like your hi-fi, Chevrolet, or 22-inch television? Apparently, too many.

Maybe the crowd was too far removed from the days of I Love Lucy to really appreciate what was mostly a flawless recreation of it. Maybe it’s better for the hardcore fans. Maybe we only think uncomfortable awkwardness is funny now. Maybe I was just annoyed by the woman wheezing and coughing up a lung in the seat behind me.

Or maybe I Love Lucy just works better inside our televisions, as opposed to in real life.